I'm new to this board and have been on WW since 8/1. While I'm doing really well - 7 pounds so far - I'm afraid I'm cheating myself when I figure recipes. I've searched and read many threads on this forum and I still don't understand how to do it and I'm usually not math impaired. What I normally do is figure out the points from the food label for each ingredient since that is for one serving. I do that for all my ingredients and then add those points together for the overall points for the whole recipe. Is this even close to being right??? Tonight I made spaghetti with meat sauce and the nutrition info is as follows:

Spaghetti -- 8 servings in box:
200 calories
4 grams fiber
1 gram fat

Ground Beef (I use Laura's Lean Beef because it's 96% lean) -- 4 servings in pkg:
140 calories
0 grams fiber
4.5 grams fat

Prego Spaghetti sauce -- 6 servings in jar:
100 calories
3 grams fiber
1 gram fat

My way of figuring gave me 9 points. I figured it out another way I saw on this board and got 6 points. Can someone please explain this s-l-o-w-l-y for me ????? Thanks so much

How many servings are you dividing it up into?

And are the calories you posted per serving or for all 4,6, or 8 servings?

It made about 8 servings. The 8, 6, and 4 are what was on each of the packages of ingredients. I really hope you can explain this to me. I'm starting to feel really stupid.

Tami

Take the cal/fat/fiber of each ingredient and multipy by the number of servings in the package:

Spaghetti -- 8 servings in box = 200 x 8 / 4 fi x 8/ 1 fat x8 = 1600 cal/8 fat/32 fiber

Ground Beef (I use Laura's Lean Beef because it's 96% lean) -- 4 servings in pkg = 140 x 4 / 0 fi x 4 / 4.5 fa x 4 = 560 cal/ 18 fat/0 fiber

Prego Spaghetti sauce -- 6 servings in jar - 100 x 6 / 1 fa x 6 / 3 fi x6 = 600 cal/18 fiber/6 fat

Then you add the cal/fat/fiber = 2760 calories/32 fat/49 fiber

I would figure it would make about 8 1 cup servings (based on teh fact that 2 oz of spaghetti makes approximately 1 cup) = 345 cal/4 fat/~6 fiber but you can only use 4 to base your points on. Now use your points finder and you get 6 points.

THE OTHER WAY TO DO IT (and even if it is a bit different than total cal/fat/fiber you day will average out because 1 point is between 25-110 calories give or take)

spaghetti = 4 points per serving x 8 servings = 32 points
meat= 3 points per serving x 4 servings = 12 points
sauce = 1 point per serving x 6 servings = 6 points

32 + 12 + 6 = 50

50 divided by 8 = 6.25 per serving

The first way you calculated it to get the 6 points is also what I did to get 6 points - I saw it on another post on this board. So, since I do now know that that was right, I think I'll stick with that way. I just really needed someone to verify it for me because I was really confused since my other way figured out to 9 points. 3 points is a huge difference!!! I could have had a snack last night and didn't! Thanks so much for answering me. This subject should really be a sticky somewhere.

Tami